Dynamic Pricing & the Rate Calendar

Hotels and campgrounds don't charge one flat rate — weekends, peak season, and minimum stays all move the price. The Rate Calendar lets the night price set itself, and the tax engine handles the rest.

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Dynamic Pricing & the Rate Calendar

A package's single price works fine for a monthly slip. It falls apart the moment you run a campground or cabins, because a Saturday in July is not worth the same as a Tuesday in March, and you shouldn't be hand-editing every booking to say so. The Rate Calendar lets the nightly price move on its own, driven by rules you set once.

You don't need to be a revenue manager to use it. The industry's pricing levers stack from dead-simple to airline-grade, and you can climb only as far as you need.

The levers, simplest first

  1. A base nightly rate per type. "Lakeview cabins are $149/night." This alone is the big shift from package pricing — the price is attached to the night, not baked into one flat figure.
  2. Day-of-week pricing. Friday and Saturday cost more. Set a weekend rate and every Fri/Sat prices itself.
  3. Seasons. Name a date range — Peak Summer, June 15 – Sep 5 — and give each type a rate for it. Peak, shoulder, and off-season stop being a spreadsheet.
  4. Minimum stay. No one-night bookings on a holiday weekend. Set a min-stay on the plan, the season, or a specific date.
  5. Stop-sell and arrival/departure closeouts. Close a date entirely (a private event), or close it to arrival (no Saturday check-ins so you don't strand a Sunday-night orphan) or to departure.

Most independent hotels and nearly every campground live entirely in levers 1–5. That's deliberately where this build aims. (Occupancy-based "the price rises as I sell out" yield management sits one rung above and can be layered on later — it just writes into this same calendar.)

Rate plans, not per-type rates

Pricing lives in a rate plan — a named, reusable price schedule ("Tent Nightly," "Electric Site," "Lakeside Cabin – Peak"). A rate plan is not tied to an asset type. Instead, a package's stay line subscribes to a plan (you pick this in the package builder: Price source → From a rate plan). That decoupling is what lets a tent site and an electric site — even physically similar — carry different prices: they're different packages on different plans. And because a package reads the same plan whether booked at the desk or online, the price is identical on both.

How a night's price is decided

For any plan and date, the system resolves the rate in this order, first match wins:

  1. A manual override you typed onto that exact date in the plan's calendar.
  2. Otherwise, the highest-priority season covering that date that prices the plan.
  3. Otherwise, the plan's base rate — then the weekend/day-of-week override on top.

Each plan carries nightly, weekly, and monthly rates, so the same plan can price a 2-night camper and a monthly slip (the package line's cadence picks which one). Weekly/monthly default to nightly ×7 / ×30 if you leave them blank.

Using the screen

Reservations → Rate Plans (requires setup permission). Pick a plan (or click New plan) and you get a month grid showing each night's resolved rate, color-coded by where it came from (plan base, season, weekend, or a manual override). Then:

  • Plan rates & rules — set nightly/weekly/monthly base, Friday/Saturday rates, default minimum stay, and which weekdays are closed to arrival or departure.
  • Click any night to override its rate (nightly/weekly/monthly), min-stay, or stop-sell it.
  • Bulk apply — set a rate or min-stay across a date range, optionally limited to certain weekdays ("every Friday and Saturday in July, $189, 2-night minimum").
  • Seasons — create a named range, give it a priority (higher wins when ranges overlap), and set this plan's in-season rates.

Then, in the package builder, set the package's stay line to Price source → From a rate plan and choose the plan. That's the link between a price card a guest sees and the schedule you maintain here.

Tax takes care of itself

This is the part that trips people up elsewhere and doesn't here. The Rate Calendar's only job is to put the right price on the booking's invoice line. Tax rules live on your invoice items, so the moment the stay charge lands on the invoice — even at a non-standard, season-adjusted, weekend-bumped price — the invoicing system calculates lodging/occupancy tax on that exact amount automatically. You set rates; you don't touch tax.

For this to work, the package's stay line points at a taxable pricelist item (the same line you put on every package). The rate plan only sets how much; the pricelist item carries the tax. Point that line's item at one with your lodging tax and you're done — and it works identically for desk and online bookings, since both bill the same package line.

Common mistakes

  • Leaving the base rate at $0. A new plan seeds at zero. If a type quotes $0, set its base rate (or a season rate) first.
  • Overlapping seasons with equal priority. When two seasons cover the same date, the higher priority wins — set them deliberately rather than relying on order.
  • Hand-editing dates that a rule already covers. A manual override is the top of the resolution order and won't move when you later change the season. Reserve overrides for true one-offs (a single sold-out holiday); let seasons and weekend rules do the repetitive work.
  • Forgetting min-stay is enforced at booking. If guests can't book a 1-night stay you think should be allowed, check the plan/season/date min-stay for that arrival night.

What's next

Pair this with booking by type (rates attach to types) and switch on online booking so your website quotes live, season-correct prices.